


fragrant primrose blossom

by velociwrangler (annavalentina)



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Altruism, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Slice of Trial Life, hatch escape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29590272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annavalentina/pseuds/velociwrangler
Summary: Jane smiled at her, a real smile. Broad and wry under dark eyes that never stopped flicking around them for more than a second. "Let's not think that way," she said dryly. "Or I'll just sit down and feel sorry for myself, and that can be saved for the campfire."
Relationships: Jane Romero/Zarina Kassir
Kudos: 3





	fragrant primrose blossom

**Author's Note:**

> This was an exercise in character voices and feeling out how I wanted to depict trials in fic. Hope it entertains, it may be slightly rough in form! I love the two of them.

She dropped to the ground, knees aching, breath coming short and fast, and looked up through hazy eyes to see Jane looking down at her. She was rumpled, bloodstained, with weary but still sharp eyes. One hand was extended - the manicure a little dented, but more pristine than it had any right to be - and Zarina grasped it and was yanked to her feet.

"Keep moving," Jane said, and gave her a quick smile. A lot had clicked about her when Zarina learned about her background; the professional air of distance that had just enough warmth to keep from seeming cold, the quick and watchful gaze, the poise and self control. She'd reminded her of some journalists Zarina knew, mixed with the charisma of a TV personality, which of course she was.

At first Zarina hadn't known what to make of her, or how much was flash and how much substance. By now she knew she liked Jane very much.

"Fuck," she whispered, grasping Jane's hand and letting the other woman pull her firmly to her feet. "Are we the last ones left?"

"No," Jane said. "The old soldier is still here...somewhere."

Zarina nodded and absently patted her pockets for her gear out of habit. It didn't matter; even if she died here and burned up, she returned with recorder in pocket. But sometimes old habits were about comfort, not practicality. "Keeping us on our toes," she said.

Jane gave her a quick, sideways half smile under her lashes. "Yes," she said. "What I would give for a few more trees right now. Her eyes are sharp today."

Zarina wasn't surprised Jane shared her thoughts on the occasionally flagging danger of the killers. It made her wonder, trials when they stumbled out of the stinging fog and faced a slow, inattentive killer. Were they trapped here too? They had to be, right? The flashes of mercy, the more-frequent vicious bursts of violence and sadism.

It would be a lie to say they were all in the same boat. But no, she didn't think they were just survivors facing specters of the Entity, mindless probing shapes. She cursed again, softly, and Jane took her elbow and tugged, guiding them into cover.

"How wounded are you?"

"Scrapes and bruises," Zarina said.

Jane spared her a quick, skeptical frown. "Really?"

"Claudette taught me well," she said dryly. "I'm patched up. I suspect I'm not going to stay that way, though, don't you?"

Jane smiled at her, a real smile. Broad and wry under dark eyes that never stopped flicking around them for more than a second. "Let's not think that way," she said dryly. "Or I'll just sit down and feel sorry for myself, and that can be saved for the campfire."

A man screamed in agony across the cornfield, a rawly deep chested sound of suffering. Jane's smile disappeared and her jaw tightened. She half turned and so did Zarina, but Jane's hand tightened on her arm before either of them could take a step. "No," Jane said, her face bloodless. "He's dead."

They both waited, standing stock still and frozen. It was part visual, part sensory. The swoop in their stomach as he was hoisted, as if a shard of their soul was hooked in his skin and felt the ground seesaw away at the same time.

"Locker?" Zarina asked, looking around.

Jane pointed. "Go."

"But - "

"The second closest is in that shack," she said flatly, and turned her back, beginning to stride away. "I won't make it in time. You go - I'll get her attention."

Zarina was too practical to linger or protest further, though she wanted to. She stumbled for the locker indicated, pulling the door open and slipping inside. The door closed on her, shutting her into the small dark space, musty and cramped. Her eyes slipped closed; she let her head thump against the back wall.

The toll that rang throughout the whole place, right into her bones, as Bill was thrown onto a hook for the final time -

Her gorge rose. She waited, counting breaths, and slipping out. She knew what Jane expected from her, what Jane intended for her to do, and she obliged; she prowled the edges of the corn, perking her ear up, waiting for a flicker or stalking step in her peripheral vision. The sounds were disorienting, the whispers and moans that slithered and breathed from the very sky. She hated them on every level.

Then she spotted it, her eyes skimming the horizon again and finding its raised, rusted edge on the hill. Right beside a slightly swinging hook, of course. Where else? She jogged closer, breath catching in her throat, just to be sure - pressed herself to the mounded stone in case the Huntress was watching for their silhouettes. Yeah. There it was.

If Jane had made good on her promise to distract, Zarina didn't know quite yet. There were no screams echoing in her ears, no phantom pains whispering over her body. Zarina stared, hard, at the outline of the still locked hatch.

Then she turned her back on it.

The old house creaked above her. She paused, listening hard, then swept on light feet up the stairs. Paused again in the inner room, craning around the doorway to try and see if anyone was looking at the doorless frame that led out into the corn. Nothing. She went upstairs as quick and light on her feet as she could manage. This generator was finished, humming and pumping away almost cheerily. The lock on the chest tucked away behind the wall was half-picked, pins fallen to the ground in front of it. Someone had been interrupted in their work.

Zarina knelt in front of it and picked up the task, her heart pounding in her ears. _Buy me time,_ she thought to Jane. _Buy me a little more time, damnit._

But she'd only just flung the lid open when Jane cried out in pain. Zarina jolted back from the chest and then half-snarled in frustration, yanking out the tin first aid box and dropping it. _Keep digging. Keep digging._

Next she found a map, soft vellum creasing under her fingers. She threw that down, too. Elodie had taught her this, but Elodie was better at it, with a keener eye. Or maybe better luck? When you rummaged in these boxes it was half junk that made her afraid she'd lose a finger to serrated metal edges of junk and half strange shapes softly draped in dark material. Your eyes didn't want to look straight at it; a pressure headache built in your temples if you tried to stare too long at its texture.

 _Give me a key. Give me a fucking key._ Jane wasn't dead just yet. Literally everything about this was a long shot, from the key itself to the hope that Jane would be hooked close enough to manage a rescue, but far enough that the Huntress wouldn't spot the hatch, or Zarina herself right away.

_Come on. Give me a -_

Her fingers closed around something cold and slim. For a heart-stopping moment of terror she thought it ended too soon, its metal bent and useless - a broken key for a cruel joke on the Entity's part. But no. No, she'd simply grasped its farthest end. She drew a whole, long, slim key out of the box and sat back on her heels.

Now....now she just had to rescue Jane, and get them both to the hatch. "Easy peasy," she whispered to herself, pushing to her feet with a stagger of intense relief and almost falling against the chipped white siding.

As if on cue, Jane fell with a last cry. Zarina boosted herself over the windowsill and went for a locker, her fingertips tingling. She tucked the key into her jacket as she folded herself behind the door, pulse pounding in her throat, eyes closing. _You can do this,_ she thought. _You can -_ A spurt of alarm shot through her. Unless Jane let the entity take her. Was she on first hook, or second? She had been wounded before. Zarina cast her mind back over the trial, trying to keep the memories from blending together as they sometimes did in this hellscape.

She'd been injured - more than once - but had she...Zarina wasn't sure. All she could do was wait and see, and hope.

Once again, the impact of an initiated sacrifice rang through the whole microcosm of this twisted little pocket world. Zarina pushed the door open and ducked out, her eyes searching the world for that strange heat vision glow of the other's silhouette, feeling a shadowed _awareness_ of Jane's pain ricochet through her ribcage.

No. It was her first hook. She knew Jane must be searched for her, trying to tell if Zarina had found the hatch, if Zarina needed her to provoke the Entity as fast as possible. Zarina thrust her fist into the air, hoping desperately that her crude silhouette would communicate _enough_ , that Jane would be able to see or maybe understand what she held.

 _Wait for me,_ she thought desperately. _Just wait for me. I have a key._

The stretch of the cornfield was so long, and Jane was a slack burning-red silhouette in the corner of her vision. Zarina paused and went almost on her hands and knees when she got close enough, straining her eyes to catch the Huntress' prowling shape between the stalks.

She was staying close. She knew her too well, apparently. Maybe they'd been a little too quick to rush to the rescue throughout the trial, flinging themselves bodily between axe and already wounded flesh. Zarina gritted her teeth and reached a tree trunk close to Jane's quiescent body; thank fuck she had some cover. She edged around a hay bale and looked up into Jane's lowered head and pain-darkened eyes.

They shared a moment of desperate, taut communion as the Huntress' melody drifted to their ears, her voice rising and falling with absent and menacing softness.

Then Jane arched her body, bloodied teeth bared in a snarl, and gripped the hook to begin to struggle again.

What was she doing? Zarina frantically signaled her to stop, but Jane ignored her. Always thinking she knew best. Zarina clenched her teeth and crouched to spring out of cover, ignoring the unspoken command.

But then -

The humming was drifting away a little. The restless, pacing circles had transformed into a determined zagging stalk through the corn. Zarina realized in a rush that the Huntress thought that Jane was acting to complete the sacrifice to give her last comrade the open hatch.

Jane stopped heaving at the hook as the humming faded further. She coughed, blood welling at her lips, her face pinched and pale. They both waited one more heartbeat.

"Now," Jane rasped, and Zarina was already surging to her feet and coming to grip her under the arms and heave her free.

"You," Zarina said through bared teeth as they began moving as quickly and quietly back around the trees and the edge of their little hell, "are a very smart fucking idiot."

Jane gave her the big smile, dazzling and confident, sweat soaked strands of hair clinging to her face. "Thank you," she said, as dignified as if her voice wasn't still raw and broken from screams of pain.

"On the hill," Zarina whispered, holding Jane's arm. Jane was leaning on her a little, putting some weight on her, and Zarina's concern spiked. Their bones crunched into place, their flesh burned and knit - but just enough to keep them running and squirming and putting up half a fight. Just enough to really spice the suffering.

Jane nodded. "She'll see us."

Zarina paused, both of them sinking into a crouch. She slipped the key out of her inside pocket and tried to press it into Jane's palm, but Jane categorically refused to take it. "I can take a hit for you," she said.

"We wait until she searches for us somewhere else," Jane said, magisterially ignoring her. Zarina narrowed her eyes.

"And if she finds the hatch and waits for us there?"

"She's not patient enough," Jane said. As much as Zarina hated to admit it right now, she trusted Jane's judgment when it came to reading people. Even the killers that hunted them in this place. "She's bloodthirsty tonight."

Zarina took in a deep breath. "All right," she said. "I can patch you up - "

"She'll know," Jane said, lips tightening. "She found Bill and I earlier. I don't know from how far she sees us, but she....she'll know."

Zarina was going to struggle to sleep tonight with that fucking hum rattling between her ears. She felt like she could barely tell if she was actually hearing it or her mind was simply playing tricks on her. "So what," she said. "We run for it?"

Jane hesitated. Then she nodded. "Yeah," she said. "We run for it."

Running, of course, being figurative. But they rose and tracked toward the hill, Jane's breath rasping beside her, Zarina's eyes scanning for movement of the corn. Anything that suggested an axe ready to fly, or a triumphant, predatory silhouette ready to round the corner. She wanted to keep Jane behind her, waiting for the Huntress to come around the rocky edge of the hill, but the truth was she could come from anywhere, and without warning how did Zarina protect her?

They were almost at the base of the hill when the hatchet whistled. Zarina gave a blurted shout of, " _down!_ " but she heard the sound of it strike home and Jane's strangled scream even as she voiced it. She spun around and saw the Huntress' shape arrowing toward them, her hum flattening into one long even tone. Satisfaction?

Zarina had one last trump card. Only one. She lunged back, waiting for the hatchet to whistle down on her, and she seized Jane. One hand clutching her arm, one already bloodied hand clutching her cheek. Jane's dark eyes were wide and horrified, and her lips formed, _go_ -

Zarina _gave_ her - whatever strange currency passed for life in this place, a bloody rush of power and blood flowing between them. The twisted, poisoned artery that danced between all the survivors. She felt her own flesh part in a stinging rush. The pain took a moment to actually hit, and in that breathless second she screamed, "up! Run! Run!"

Jane gasped for breath and shoved up, her face tightening. She almost bumrushed Zarina, an arm across Zarina's torso as Zarina briefly buckled over when the pain hit. They hit the ground, both yelling breathlessly, and the Huntress' axe whistled through the air above their heads. Jane's warm weight was briefly on her, breath sweeping across her face, then she was pushing up again. She half dragged Zarina, Zarina kicking with her booted heels in the dirt, until they were scrambling and up, lunging for the hatch. The Huntress was _on_ them, and Zarina shoved her hand into her coat and felt the key light to icy fire in her fingers. A little more pain on top of everything else. Barely worth noticing.

The metal hatch into an earthen abyss swung open. They both plunged through. With such force her throat ached Zarina screamed, half laughing with mad relief, "kiss my ass!"

Then the Fog took them, and the trial...completed.


End file.
